Departing from the title, the video establishes a divergent parallelism between the spouses of the Senegalese immigrants and Odyssey’s’ Penelope.
Sinossi
Parallelism since all of them remain prolonged periods of time waiting for the return home of their husbands. Divergence since these women not only occupy the place of Penelope, but subvert it. Odyssey’s Penelope is a subordinate character, who does not speak for herself and is relegated to the home space, in Unfolding Penelope, the main characters in the story are these women. They are the object and the subject, breaking the silence that the social context imposes. Thus taking the power of enunciation, and question the spectator by
breaking a double stereotype: being a woman and being an African one, to tell us how they use their agency to negotiate with the social pressure that surrounds them, that, like the 'Odyssey would like to relegate them to a second plane.
The video breaks the Eurocentric gaze, which tends to look at immigration just as something that changes our nearby landscape, but tends to silence the effects and changes that it causes in the emigrant’s homeland.
The Video questions the traditional figure of the testimony, experimenting ways in which to show visual ethnography, emphasizing that all narration, also like everything that is silenced in the margins, is not by its very nature, it is built or silenced by the social gaze.
For this reason, the video maintains the theatrical structure that had arose from the research and work process.
